New York Fashion Week: Rodarte spring/summer 2012

Ah, those crazy Rodarte girls. Over the last few seasons sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy have become the fashion darlings of America's coolest young things. The alt-designers
de nos jours
, they're moody, chin-stroking lovers of horror movies and gothic imagery who are seen as that rarest of beasts in fashion: intellectuals. This makes them fashion catnip.

It's an image crafted as carefully as the distressed skeins of their web-like wispy knits. For their spring/summer 2012 collection the sisters have hitched their wagon to the Impressionists, an impeccably high-falutin' visual reference that everyone's heard of.

Sunflower prints - sometimes pixellated, sometimes pretty much just as Van Gogh painted them - were heavily-in-evidence, as well as his pulsating lavender fields, spiralling sunbeams and Monet-flashes of London sunset. (That's as good my art references get, and actually I might have been pushing it with Monet.) Van Gogh painted some extremely beautiful sunflowers, so they looked extremely beautiful here too. And the the dresses they adorn are worthy canvasses to bear the image. Maybe those Rodarte girls should stop agonising so much.